An interwoven set of reminiscences about Grass Valley and Nevada City from the Gold Rush era to the mid-20th century, told by multiple voices who chronicle mining life, town rivalry, and a shared, enduring community spirit. The narratives span mid-century upheavals—WWII rationing, mine closures and Empire Mine preservation, and early aviation—while tracing landmarks, place, and the close ties that bind families to the area. A parallel thread recalls rural Northern California childhood in these towns—free-roaming youth, ranching traditions, the 1950s freeway reshaping the landscape, and abundant volunteerism—cultivating a lasting sense of home and hometown loyalty.

Full Transcript of the Video:

I was born in Nebraska.

My mother, sister, lived here.

Our first husband had died and
she married a miner and they moved to Grass Valley in 32.

He went to work in the mines.

She kept after my mother by phone and letter, you have to come out here because there's
no depression here.

Everybody's making money.

Mines are all flourishing.

Miners are making
five bucks a day.

I'm stealing ten.

So we moved here in August of, what, 35 I guess?
I came here because of the job.

I sort of had to look up Nevada County.

Thomas Cole was a ship captain.

He came to San Francisco with his ship and crew during
the Gold Rush.

The crew, as soon as they got to San Francisco, heard about the Gold Rush.

They jumped ship and they went gold mining.

He no longer had a crew, couldn't move the ship.

So somehow he ended up in Bridgeport and he married my great grandmother, Victoria Cole.

I actually saw a picture of her grandfather in one of the Nevada County books.

Yeah.

Panning for gold on a deer creek.

In a suit.

In a suit.

In a suit.

It's probably like after church or something.

My great grandfather, on my mom's side, he died in a mining accident in 1890 in Smarksville.

He was head of a mining operation and was mining deep underneath the South River, the
Uva River as we crossed that big long bridge on Highway 20 heading to Maryfield, Uva City.

In 1884, they abolished hydrolyte gold mining.

You couldn't hydrolyte gold mining anymore.

Well, the family was still out there.

That was their living.

So they hydrolyte mined at night.

And my grandmother, Lyda Ogden, she was in the grammar school and the feds came.

And they had derby hats and she said to them, they go, are you the feds?
I said, yes, I got to go tell my grandfather and my father and all my uncles that you're
in town because they're mining at night.

My grandfather, who was a hoistmaster, and that was supposed to have been the best paying
job in the mine because it had the most responsibility, lowering the miners down and back up along
with the ore carts.

And they had the bell system.

And they'd ring the bell so he knew
what levels they were at in the mine.

And this one check is for $71.

20.

The other check
is for $80.

70.

Now, I never knew if that was a month's pay, but I'm thinking it's a month.

And on the other side of the road, we go up to the highway.

There was a spring hill mine.

We could only go in there on Sundays and sneak into the burner and there'd be all these hot
colds and we'd throw people stuff in there in those flames and shit up and stuff like
that.

I did remember as a little boy in Grass Valley going there and when you go to the show, it
would tremble the theater because of the stamp mills running down into Pennsylvania.

It was a very, very noisy place.

There were 80 stamps and each one of those stamps weighed
1,750 pounds.

And they came down 65 to 75 times a minute.

If any one of those stamps
had not done it, it was supposed to do crush the rock with that speed and that weight.

It would have had the whole community awake and wondering what had happened.

You know, we've always talked about Grass Valley being the working man's town.

In Nevada
City, the courthouses and the owners of the mines enjoy Nevada City a little bit better
than listening to the stamp mill down here 24 hours a day, I'm sure.

But I think Nevada
City has everything in the world to be proud of because of their history and Grass Valley
as well.

They're just different, came from different roots, but all the same.

A lot of Fourth of July parades were here for us growing up.

It was the time where you
would see everybody you knew on the same day.

At least for me, I remember we never went
to the parade when it was in Grass Valley, hardly ever.

It was like Sac Religious.

You
would go to the parade when it was in your town only.

And then the other thing they used
to do when we were kids, it was great fun.

At the bottom of Broad Street, right by the,
what's the brewery, what is it now? Oh, the Stone House.

The Stone House, yeah.

So the
two fire departments from the two towns would have a water fight.

The fire department would
have their water fight down at the end of the plaza.

And that was when people get soaked
and they didn't care.

It was a lot of fun watching them.

And it was interesting how big
the ball that they were pushing back and forth.

They'd get down on Spring Street.

I remember
a little girl, the two fire departments at each end of Spring Street, Nevada City.

And
they had this big round ball.

It had to have been rubber or something.

And the firemen
with their hoses would push it back and forth.

And so the, I'm sure the water would be
diverted.

Oh yeah.

But they would be trying to push it from one end to the kind of like
a tug-of-war only with this big rubber ball.

But people were soaked and wet.

I mean, it
wasn't great.

Actually, the only time we noticed there was a rivalry is when the Nevada City
High School played the Grass Valley High School and football games.

That was the biggest thing.

I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't that much.

It was just because it had been, we thought it
should still continue to be as the way I feel it was.

But it was fun.

My mother was a cheer
leader with Norma Galino for Grass Valley.

And there was a big rivalry game coming up
between the two towns.

My mom and Norma made up this cheer.

There ain't no flies on us.

There ain't no flies on us.

There may be flies on Nevada City High, but there ain't no flies
on us.

The next day, they were called into the principal office for that because that
was sportsman's life.

We were really friends.

I mean, whether we were supposed to be here
or not, we were.

I don't think the rivalry was that much.

Not in my, that I can remember
anyway, except on the football games.

But of course, it's like that with the Giants and
the A's right now.

So what's the difference? I mean, it's part of life, I guess.

There's another area of Nevada County life that people don't talk about much, but there
used to be gang fights between Grass Valley and Nevada City.

And I was just old enough
to actually go to one of the last ones.

Towards the end of it, yeah.

There were the Grass Valley
kids and there were us Nevada City kids and they had chains.

They had bottles.

They had
fisticuffs, the whole nine yards.

I was there.

I watched it start and I kind of just went
hid behind a tree.

It was like, I'm not a fighter.

Never have been.

And it scared the
Bejesus out of me and I thought, oh God, I hope I don't have to do this when I get into
high school.

It was called Cashi Field and the boys from Grass Valley would come over
and the young boys from Nevada City and they would have fisticuffs.

They would really fight.

They had terrible battles.

I couldn't believe it.

Of course, as a girl, I was not involved.

That's what my brothers were.

Not the oldest brother because he was always the good one
as a family.

You see, before they had a joint union high school, there was two high schools.

There was the Empire High School in Grass Valley and then there was Seven Hills High School
in Nevada City.

But they were called Nevada City and Grass Valley High Schools.

So these
kids did not like each other.

I mean, it was the classic West Side story kind of thing.

So Nevada City and Grass Valley were two totally different towns.

It was like being in Nevada
City and Sacramento.

Nobody knew anything about the Grass Valley people and nobody knew
anything about the Nevada City people.

I live in Nevada City and when my mom was alive, it
was still hard for her to come to my house because she was coming to Nevada City.

She
just did not like the town.

Grass Valley was settled first and it was settled by a group of minors called the Boston Company.

And that was the first small, very small community that started in Grass Valley.

But Nevada City
started with a store over on Nevada Street where the Trinity Church is now.

And this man
Caldwell had a store farther down Deer Creek.

And so they called this one Caldwell's Upper
Store.

And then they called it Deer Creek Dry Digging because the gold find was not as
good as it was rumored to be.

And so a lot of people that come to this area to look for
their ancestors that, oh yes, he mined in Grass Valley or Nevada City.

Well, he might have
come here, but he probably wasn't here for very long and moved on for better picking.

Our great-grandfather ran a sawmill there in the 1870s through the early 1880s, cut timbers
for the mines.

But he originally came in seeking gold, came out during the gold rush.

But it was quick to learn that he wasn't going to make a good living gold mining because
the 49ers on Shady Creek splits our ranch in half.

And 49ers pretty well had Shady Creek
mined out before he got hold of Shady Creek.

My grandfather on the ranch at Indian Springs had a few pine trees down there.

And he bought
the ranch.

And of course in those days you had to clear the ranches for grazing and for
anything that the cattle or sheep to run on.

And of course pine trees aren't a very good
thing for grazing.

So a man by the name of Morris Seaman came in there and took the timber
off of our ranch there at Indian Springs.

And when he did it, it amazed me, he took an
Army 6x6 six-wheel drive truck.

He had an A-frame on the back of it.

And he would back up to
these logs that were laying on the ground, of course cut in 16-foot lengths.

And he dragged
them over under a tree and hoist them up there and put them on a truck.

But at that same time, we didn't have any equipment at the ranch.

Everything was done
with horsepower.

They cut the hay, they hauled it into the barn, we dried it into the barn
with a Jackson fork for the winter hay for the cattle.

And I had taught my dad into buying
a hay baler.

So we went to Marysville and we bought a Hayes hay baler.

And we couldn't
have a very good way to pull that hay baler.

So we bought an Army half-track.

And I pulled
the hay baler around our ranch and quite a few of the other ranches around there, baling
the hay.

So he's going to put it in the barn in bales or sell it.

So that's how I got
any of the logging bills.

After I saw Morris Seaman doing it, it was that 6x6.

And I said,
boy, if Morris Seaman can skid logs with a 6x6, I can skid more logs with a half-track.

So we drugged all those logs into that sawmill.

So that was the very start getting in the
sawmill.

And I wasn't in the sawmill, but I'd been in the logging business.

First time I ever met John Casey.

He had a sawmill up in the northwestern end of the
town of North San Juan, another town.

It's a little community.

I sold him a full-page
ad and had to run a proof up there.

And he commuted back and forth from the other
town.

I sold him a full-page ad and had him back up on banner.

Same thing.

So I sold
him a lower Robertson and a full-page ad in that section.

We had a sawmill right up by our house.

It was a Spring Hill sawmill, but working six
days a week, you know, the buzz of the saw going meant prosperity.

You know, a few of
them were U-B-R-I-V-R was.

It was a sawmill of meeks.

It was meeks after that.

Now that
was a sawmill they had, and they still got their big vermin there.

B and C, the two
value, you know, the Fowlers, they had a sawmill on that closed down.

All they did
was sell lumber after that.

Judy was a little sticker.

She was very active.

She hasn't changed at all.

When she was
a little girl, we lived in one end of town in the new house, and sawmill was up on the
hill on the other side.

It was about a mile apart, and she took her little sandbag bucket
with a shovel, and she walked, and she couldn't have been born two years older.

She walked
all the way, well, she was two-and-a-half, because Lawrence had that.

She walked all the
way up to the sawmill by herself through her daddy.

And as she entered the sawmill
property, the sawmill men closed down the mill just like that.

And Frank come running
on to it, and they poured it to Julia.

It was the Spring Hill Sawmill, the Brunswick Mill, the Bohemian Mill out there.

I mean,
there was, you couldn't drive anywhere in Nevada County and not get behind a logging truck.

And, you know, people just put up with that, because that was common.

That was money coming
to the area.

Just this side of Casa Gonzales was the Caffeine Rice Sawmill, and the sawmill was still operating
when I was a kid.

And some of the time when you'd be driving up the street, you would
have to stop and wait, because the loader had to back out in the Gracie Road to load
the logs on the track to send them into the mill.

So it was, they literally had to back
into the road to get it on to the tracks to go into the sawmill.

So, and then operated.

When did they close down Caffeine Rice Sawmill?
Oh, God, I've forgotten this, been a while.

When the sawmill started closing, that was, it was pretty, I think that was almost as devastating
as the mines closing.

The mines closing was sort of corresponded with the end of World
War II, and so it was, you know, a lot of the things going on.

My husband went into the service, and he was in, I think there were six or eight from Nevada
County, they went, by then the war was really settling down to being almost over.

So anyway,
he was only in the service for about 22 months, so that was kind of nice too.

So while he
was in the service, I went to work at the Plaza Grocery, which is now Lefty's wonderful
food establishment, and at that time it was a very large grocery store on the very lower
floor.

They sold all kinds of grain for your critters, for your cows, for your chickens,
whatever.

The next floor they had all kinds of groceries, and on the top floor where you
would go up on an elevator is where they kept all the things that were very hard to get
unless you had food stamps like cigarettes, and all those things were kept on the top
floor that were locked up.

It was a fun time, but it was a hard time.

There were so many
things you couldn't get that you thought you needed, but you found out you could do without.

When we were brought into the war very suddenly and disastrously with Pearl Harbor in December
of 41, almost the next day the War Production Board issued orders to get everybody into the
war effort.

They were either in the service or they had to be working in a company that
had a productive war effort.

Gold was not one of those things, and so they issued an order
called L-208 for the immediate close of all of the gold mines.

That's why they closed.

They didn't close because there wasn't gold, they closed because of the defense that we
had put out to be sure we won this war.

When the war was over, the order was lifted and
the mines gradually got back into production, but by that time it was costing $39 an ounce
to get gold out to the market, and by law the government kept the price at $35 an ounce.

We can't run a business losing $4 an ounce, and they all closed one by one by one, and
they were all closed by 56 when the Empire closed.

I think that my favorite landmark is probably the Empire Mine because of its historic significance
and its beauty, and I think it's just a great fact to have inside the city limits of the
Grass Valley.

It's just awesome.

On the weekend in Nevada City, I saw this big billboard outside the Empire Mine, and it
was a for sale sign.

Well, I at the time worked for a very prominent person in the assembly
of the California legislature, and I went back to him and said that the people of this
community, the paper, the Kiwanis Club, everybody recognizes this beautiful property that it
looks like a park now anyhow should be part of the park system as a souvenir of the greatest
part of California history.

He said, okay, you go upstairs to William Penn Mott, who is
the head of the Department of Parks and Recreation, and get him on board, and I will see that
he gets the money.

We could ride our bikes through the woods up to Empire Mine, and there was a fence on
Empire Street you could go under into the mine property, and the only other man there
was a Chinese gardener and the goldfish.

It was beautiful.

When I got older, I'd go up
there, lay on the grass and read and do my homework.

It was quiet.

It was peaceful.

Obviously, as with many other people, we have a real interest in the Empire Mine.

My dad
worked there as a young man and used to take us there, and we're very glad that it's
preserved as it is in a really fine state.

I love it.

I'm proud of it.

Every time I go by this sign.

Okay.

I worked for a lawyer across the street, a little white building over here.

His name
was Frank Finnegan, and one of his clients was Lyman Gilmore, and when Mr. Gilmore came
to visit his lawyer, it was a sight to behold.

A greasy old felt hat, a long old overcoat.

He was a real town character.

There's a lot of history written about Lyman Gilmore.

He was very key in the gold mines
and developed a lot of machinery that he had patented, but he also had a very keen interest
in aviation at a time when nobody else did.

He was building gliders and pulling them with
horses before the turn of the century.

He developed and designed airplanes which were
to be steam powered because there was no efficient gas engine available at that time.

He had grandiose visions of eight passenger airplanes powered by steam and monoplanes
and things like that, and he's actually rumored to have flown before the Wright brothers.

Pappé News made a little 15 minute film of him.

He and his brother were up on a ladder
by the plane, and they took a broom and hit the plane, and the dust flew like everything.

It had just been stored in there for years and years and years, and of course, whether
he really flew or not is still a question.

One of them is still here at Nevada County Airport.

Nevada City Airport is gone, and
Gilmore Field, where Gilmore School is, is gone.

So I've always had an interest in flying.

My brother learned to fly at Nevada City in 1937, and I learned to fly at Gilmore Field
in 1947, so those were always dear to my heart.

This airport, which was abandoned throughout World War II into the early 50s, was acquired
by the Litton family upon moving up here in 1956.

The California Department of Forestry
and the U.

S.

Forest Service at the same time were pioneering aerial firefighting using surplus
aircraft from World War II that were inexpensive, bringing them up here and fitting them with
large tanks to bombard forest fires from the air.

So they partnered with Litton and with
the community and began some of the very early air tanker operations at this airport as well.

We would go up to the airport occasionally.

I remember laying on the side of the airport
when they first dropped the boring planes in, and they would take off, and you know,
we'd sneak up on the back side and we're laying right along that runway, and those big old
two-engine planes go by where their engine's roaring, and it was like, wow, I've never heard
anything, and it's like rolling thunder.

That was really cool.

Growing up on Granview Terrace, we were right under the flight path of some of the most incredible
airplanes I'd ever seen in my life.

Big four-engine bombers, twin-engine bombers, loud, dramatic,
exciting, right over the house.

And my father, who had served in World War II, had quite
a library of books on history of these airplanes, and so I would ask him, Dad, what was that?
And he would say, well, that's an F7F Tiger Cat.

That's a TVM Avenger.

That was a World
War II torpedo bomber.

Well, what's it doing flying out of Grass Valley? Well, you know,
they're boring bombers now.

When Gilmore Airport was open, where the school is now, there was a tower, and then there
was a big redwood tree at the medicine house, like Caddy Corner, this house, and our big
old tree, the plane used to line up with the yellow tower, and the big redwood tree and
our old tree and fly through it, and that's how they lined up to the airfield.

So we always
had planes, what little planes we had at that time, fly over our house.

Stu Carson, who is the resident on the airport here, his father was Harold McBoyle's pilot,
and his father flew from this airport beginning in 1933, flying gold from the Idaho Maryland
mines straight to the San Francisco Mint.

And so Stu remembers as a kid growing up here,
living in the old Idaho Maryland mines, and coming up here and his father would be flying
the gold from McBoyle on a routine basis.

They trained at major and became friendly with many people up here, so they got into a routine
that when they left to go to the Pacific area, they would come up and buzz town, their friends,
and let them know they were leaving.

The one came up one day, made a few passes, took off
about eight or ten feet of the right wingtip, laid over and went right down Pleasant Street
and went into a grove of pine trees across from Mount St.

Mary's, which was very close
to their nunnery, but it didn't go into that.

And it hit those trees and exploded, and it
was a terrible boiling fire.

They were full of gas.

They had incendiary bombs for some reason
or another on the plane, and it was spectacular, but it was terrible.

And I lived on Brighton
Street, which was only a couple of blocks away, and I ran over there because I figured
I could help.

I had my Boy Scott uniform on because I was practicing with my mother.

And I think, well, I'm all official.

I got my uniform on.

I can go over there and maybe help
direct people or something.

So it was just a terrible, terrible thing to see.

Later on when we were older and we danced a lot, we went to Lake Olympia, where they had this wonderful
dance floor in the middle of the lake with a tree growing up in the middle and the walkway going across.

They had a swimming pool with a very high diving board that was cemented in, and they had bathhouses.

My father was one of his relatives had drowned in the Yuba River, so he didn't want us girls
to be near water, especially the rivers.

So none of us had a bathing suit.

So when we went to Lake Olympia, we had to rent a bathing suit.

Believe me, that was not fun.

They were wool.

They had a round neck, of course.

They were built quite modestly with a big number on it
because you had to return them.

But itch, oh wow, they were horrible.

But that's, we could not,
my father would not allow us to have a bathing suit because he didn't want us any place unless we were
very well supervised.

So we rented the wool bathing suit.

Lake Olympia is out in the Glenbrook Basin, and people have a really difficult time locating it.

In the basin, I can't remember the name of the street, but it goes that way.

There's a Goodyear store,
a tire store right there, and directly across the street you can see a little mound of dirt with
entire tracks that go up over it.

And if you take that, which I've done several times,
if you take that, it goes back down into the Olympia Basin.

So you're still too young to remember the old, um, lake.

I'm too old to remember.

Lake Olympia.

Yeah.

All about the racetrack out that way.

I mean, it's a whole other world.

It was just magical.

My mom used to go out there and swim.

They'd have nicks and stuff.

Out in the center of the lake had a huge dance hall skating rink.

And some of the big bands that later became big bands played there for dances at Lake Olympia.

And then the rotor skating rink was open most of the time when they weren't there.

Lake Olympia was popular.

You know, it was a place where people would go to have picnics,
you know, they'd have canoeing and had a nice sun on a lake.

They had a big trapeze swing.

You could swing out of a lake, drop in.

It was a concrete swimming pool on the other side.

And they had dances and rotor skating on this, on the lake there, on that big round building that was there.

Lake Olympia's dance hall had a sprung floor.

I don't know if you've ever heard of that or not, but there's big springs all around underneath the store.

And particularly when you're rotor skating with the organ music playing and it starts to undulate a little bit.

And you kind of go around and float around all around the store.

It was really very interesting.

You know, we didn't have enough money to go in the correct way and pay a quarter to go swimming.

So we'd sneak in the back way and we'd swim in the lake from the back side.

And that was a lot of fun, but then in 1958, the roller skating rink, where I learned to roller skate,
in the middle of the lake, you know, burned down.

That sort of changed everything.

It seemed like, I mean, the area was somewhat depressed with mines closing down.

And Lake Olympia was kind of the final blow that just sort of, that was it.

It was owned by the former of Grass Valley, Police Chief Vint Sack.

It was owned by his parents.

And when the fire burned down, their main source of income, which was the roller skating rink,
where they had the dances and everything, that, that was significant.

It seemed like to me, I mean, it was 1958, I was nine years old.

Because that cut off a big part of the entertainment of Grass Valley.

And it was like a destination.

It was the destination, I think.

Nevada City was just a small town, lovable town.

Everybody knew everybody.

Actually, I don't think there was any bad things ever happening.

I remember on Halloween, we wrote on the Union Office building with a wax candle.

And we thought that was being very daring to do such a nasty thing to them.

It brings up a story.

I remember one great story that just, it always comes to mind.

It used to be where Java Johns is now used to be a liquor store years ago.

And I was like 16 or something and I went in there to buy some alcohol.

And because I thought, you know, I look pretty old and I could, I was tall and I could get away with it.

Well, I was almost ready to get away with it.

And Officer Don Duncan walked in.

And he sized up the situation just like that.

And he came up and he goes, I don't know.

I said, I'm doing good, Don.

And the guy behind the counter is looking at me and looking at him.

And I'm like, he pulls out some tobacco and he goes, want to chew?
And I went, oh, sure, sure.

I've never smoked.

I didn't do anything.

Anyways, I took a big glob of it and put it in my mouth.

I must have turned green and purple.

And he's just like looking at me and he's just being all everything.

And I just kind of said, you know, I'm going to come back and get this stuff a little later.

Got out the door as quick as I could and got this stuff out.

I looked back and they were laughing.

That was the kind of town it was, okay?
Where the police, instead of trying to arrest you, they actually worked with you.

And it was a good lesson because I didn't try it again.

Well, as a young kid, my mother had a beauty shop on Commercial Street.

She was four generations born in Nevada City and her maiden name was Randall, Club Randall.

And at that beauty shop, all my school teachers got their hair done there.

So from kindergarten to the fourth grade, my mother knew more about what I did during the day than I knew.

I used to walk all the way across downtown Grass Valley from Grand View Terrace.

And you didn't dare get in trouble on the way to school or on the way home because everybody knew everybody.

And your mom always knew that you were in hot water before you even got home.

When I was nine years old, delivering papers.

My first route was down Richmond Street, Washington Street, Broadview High,
which my aunt used to call Hill Hill because when they first built, that's when I went with the doctors today.

It was one thing that all 12 of us Mal children did, four things.

We all went to Mount St.

Mary's.

We all went to St.

Patrick's Church.

We all worked for Mal Paint and Glass, and we all delivered the Union newspaper.

The 12 of us all one after another delivered that paper in the same route.

We used to call route 1107.

And our route was from Arch Brooks' down to BNC True Value, which is BNC Lumberyard in those days.

And then all the neighborhoods in between for hours.

That was our claim to fame.

My sister used to walk around like everyone's well until I got to Knob Hill and Ice Cream Bar or a Candy Bar.

And that's the last I saw of her.

She's gone.

She got her Candy Bar.

On recess time, we played an ante over.

Now, I'm not exactly sure what it was that we threw over,
but my sister lost, threw something over the well, and hit Tito's silicone and he cut his head.

And she was so frightened, instead of running into the school teacher, she ran home to mom and said,
I killed him.

I killed him.

I killed him.

And so anyway, that was the big experience of the school.

So after that, Andy over was a kind of a more cautious game.

There was a huge water tank up on this property.

It seemed huge to me when you're seven, eight years old.

Everything seemed huge, but there was a big water tank up there.

We'd climb up there, you know, and we'd be frowning and get down and ride our bikes down this dusty road that the dust would be just flying like crazy.

One day we got caught.

We were up there and we see this guy walking over there.

And I guess it was Mr. Litt.

I've never met him since, but he walked us into this office.

There was, I don't know, three or four of us kids.

You know, the big family, you're pretty much stuck together.

You know, you had a few friends, but it was mostly family.

He walked us in there.

I remember this stern guy goes, are you the male kids?
Yes, sir.

You want me to tell your dad what you're doing?
No, sir, no, sir, don't do that.

No, no, no, we'll do anything.

We'll do anything.

We'll work for you, whatever you want.

If we don't tell our dad, we do it, get a weapon for, you know, being up in that water tower.

We had to walk everywhere.

We wanted to go to the paint shop, ride our bikes.

We didn't have helmets in those days, but we still got wrecks.

Our heads were still there.

We always had to walk to Memorial Park and the whole swimming pool before we built the new one.

Friday night, we always go to the show.

And we were rowdy kids in those days.

They had to stop the show.

And the manager would hang it up there, too.

And I'd tell us to behave or they were shut down the theater and we would have to leave.

Tell him to do that.

You were in so much trouble.

I was in terrible trouble.

We did a lot of bicycle riding as children.

Everybody had a bicycle.

I lived on, it was the Old Donnieville Highway.

And so we got on our bikes.

It was just before dinner time and decided we'd ride down to the Yuba River.

And so we went all the way down to the Yuba River and then we started back home and then we came across this flume.

And I said, oh, this is great.

We'll get on this flume and it'll come right behind the house and it'll save us so much time.

But it did not go in the direction I thought.

It got dark and we were pushing our bikes on this.

And it must have been some kind of moonlight because I don't know how we did it.

We found later there were fifty foot drops.

And we finally got to a light in the distance and it was the ditch tinder's home.

And we went up there and knocked on their door and they took us in.

It was one o'clock in the morning.

And they fed us and called my parents and my mom and dad came and taught us.

And I love that story.

It's a great place to grow up.

And especially as boys you just have all this country to romp in and do what you want.

But Fred was right.

We always had our chores to do.

And we had to do the chores before we could go do the romping or whatever, exploring or whatever.

I think it was a real sense of community that everybody kind of knew everybody.

I had some of the same teachers that my mom and dad had when they were in school.

You know, now I even run into people that were in my brownie troupe, you know, kids that you grew up with.

And it was a really good place to be a kid.

You know, we just had free reign of everything.

There was the mine roads out there and there was a spring hill mine.

But occasionally there was a caretaker there that would run us off.

Most of the time not.

So we pretty much, you know, other than occasionally a car would go by on the mine roads, we'd have free reign of the place.

And just outside our house probably 20 feet away were the thickest manzanita bushes growing together that I've ever seen.

My husband had the Giants Little League baseball team from the time they were babies
and took the same team all the way through until they were into, let's see, Babe Ruth and then the next one after that.

And in those days if you had one child safe from the Baker family, all the Baker families were on the same team.

So we were lucky we had a boy named Jim Mowell.

So we had lots of Mowells on our team.

We actually had tunnels that you'd have to get on your hands and knees and go through the manzanita bushes for maybe 100 feet
and then come out on the other side and then there was a field out there.

And in this field we set up a baseball diamond.

We had to clear some of the brush away.

It was just so much fun to watch them from barely able to hold up a bat to be nice big tall young men 14, 15 years old.

So we had our own baseball diamond.

We had the field.

Further on we had what we called bullet hill where we'd go out and practice shooting.

Imagine doing that now.

It was probably right where the freeway is, is where that little hill was that we shot into.

And then beyond that we had an underground fort and then a tree fort that we used to go play in all the time.

I mean it was like a huck fin growing up.

You know, it's just unbelievable now you look at the area.

At that time we lived down in the Bay Area and were city folks and coming here was very much coming to the country.

I mean my granddad as I say had poultry and dairy cows and goats and horses and all this stuff that kids love.

So it was a good early connection.

The cattle drives were huge.

We would take cows from up at Columbia Hill and up above that bloody run and that and bring them all the way down to Smartsville.

So all traffic out on the highway 49 there would stop for a while while the cows went by and you'd have a whole day of it.

It was two days to get there.

You just, you know, there was traffic would just stop all along North Columbia Road.

What's the.

.

.

Come down that and then we would come down over French Corral through Bridgeport.

Over the cover bridge.

Always remember the cattle running across the Bridgeport Bridge how the bridge would jump up and down.

And it always amazed me that in the early days that the engineering, the people were smart enough to be able to build a bridge out of wooden timbers like that.

In those days it must have had some very sharp individuals that knew how to engineer to build a bridge like that.

We enjoyed it, but I got to say for me at the end of the day after doing that, you've been to rock concerts before where your ears are ringing.

Well, instead of your ears ringing, you'd hear literally just be ringing your ears the sound of the cows.

There was a brand that my great grandfather had registered in California and it was JR.

So they let it go to Lakeland when they got rid of the numbers of cattle that they were running.

And so my father who was born in 1914, somewhere in the 30s or in there when he might have been in the late 20s, when he started getting back into cattle and starting into cattle, he went to register a brand.

So he tried to get the JR brand back that his grandfather had run so many years.

Well, it was taken up and it was taken up by the Robinson's match.

So they still run the JR brand, but it was originally Jim Reader and it was, if not the oldest, one of the oldest registered brands in California.

My dad was awful disappointed when he couldn't get it back.

So then he registered FR for Francis Reader and that was his name.

And they cut the J off the brandy iron and put the F on, but the R, and we still use it today, Fred runs the brand today.

The R is the original R that was on the JR brand from the 1800s.

You know, they were big cattle guys, right? I mean, not exactly through town.

I don't remember any through town, but I think they went from Penn Valley area where they started kind of out Newtown Road and then from where the Willow is, 49 up north.

They would drive them right up the highway.

You know, I remember getting stuck in a traffic jam and having all these cattle go by.

The freeway was a big change, a very large change because there were definitely sides that were against it and the kind of tore even families apart.

They didn't agree about what was going on.

But I can imagine trying to get between Grass Valley and Nevada City today without the freeway.

This town, Grass Valley and Nevada City area in the 50s was pretty dead.

Nobody knew where Grass Valley was outside the area, it seemed like.

And the roads to Auburn and Marysville were windy and it took a long time to get anywhere.

The freeway took out the, I think it was called the Nevada City Sanatorium.

I can't think of the woman who ran it, but my mother was born there in the Nevada City and so was her brother Vincent.

And of course, the freeway took that out.

Of course, I've lived here all my life.

I was born in Nevada City and a little sanatorium right in the middle of the freeway, of course, where the freeway was built.

Grass Valley, they just took out streets, whole streets of small frame houses where families lived.

Bush and Blake and down close to the end of where the railroad ended.

The freeway, when they were building, first starting to build the freeway, they came out and they staked everything.

They staked where everything was going to be.

And that was our backyard they were staking.

So we went out there and we pulled up all these stakes.

We brought them in and put them in a shed in our backyard.

And so about a month later, we go out and they're re-staking these things.

So we pull them all up again, put them in the shed.

And about two months later, a month later, they come back and they put stakes in and they took chalk and they made X's where all that was.

You can imagine, I mean, it took us half a day to pull those stakes up and move all that chalk out of the way so they couldn't tell where they were.

We did not want, mostly my little brother, I gotta blame him, Tom.

He did not want freeway in his backyard.

Nevada City change was really hard for me, the freeway coming in, things like that.

That was really tough and I was a bit of a prankster, you know, going and putting sugar in gas tanks and things like that.

I, of course, didn't do any of that, but we really didn't like it.

The company that originally started the freeway went bankrupt and I feel a little guilty that we may have been part of the cause of that.

And so they stopped actually the freeway construction for about two years.

So it wasn't until I was probably a senior in high school, I graduated in 1968 that they actually got the freeway going through.

Because I remember driving on the gravel part, we weren't supposed to, you know, just got my license.

The first contractor I know went broke building the freeway and another one had to come in and finish it.

And, of course, it's hard to, everybody believe that all of the traffic coming down Highway 49 or on Highway 20 went over the roads over here.

And that's in the days when there was maybe 12 sawmills in the area and an awful lot of trucking all went over those roads without any problems.

All we really and truly wanted from a new road between Grass Valley and Nevada City were some turnouts so that we didn't have to follow the lumber trucks all the way and be late for work.

Because, like many people, you lived in one town and worked in the other one.

And I lived in Nevada City at that time and worked in Grass Valley.

It took 20 minutes to half an hour sometimes to get the four miles to Grass Valley.

When they were building the freeway, when Dad would get off of work and in the early evening we would get in the Jeep and we would go down and cruise the freshly grated dirt of the freeway down to Brunswick.

And then we would get off and take the old highway and come back.

I remember when that went in, because I remember it was a big deal to go on a ride down the freeway when it opened.

And that was like, if you behave, we'll take you in the car ride.

You know, we only had two TV stations or something back then.

There wasn't a lot to do, so we made up, you know, and stuff.

Of course, the one in Nevada City, we called the Big Ditch, because it was a ditch for a long time, full of water, because they dug it out and let it settle, I guess.

I remember one Sunday afternoon I came to town and there were people who were digging in the mountains of dirt over there, and they were looking for bottles.

And they put a stop to it right that day, because they were afraid, these people, who were down five and six feet in a hole in the ground, it would cave on them and they'd have problems.

Dr. W.

P.

Sawyer from Nevada City was called and he came out to attend to all of us.

First of all, he delivered the baby, which happened to be me.

He brought a midwife along with him, which was Mrs.

Tonella.

And he handed me, who apparently was very small, to Mrs.

Tonella and said, take care of her.

She's not going to live.

And she said, oh, yes, she will.

So in those days, of course, it was very hot and no other heat other than a wood stove.

So she went to the kitchen, so I was told, built up a big fire, got a basket, put this little tiny me in the basket and on the oven door.

She said to the doctor, I will be feeding her sugar and brandy.

He said, what? She fed me sugar and brandy, I suppose, for many days.

And here I am, 95 years old later, very healthy and thanks to Mrs.

Tonella.

My mother was pregnant with the number six child, which happens to be me.

So they started or took over malpainting glass in 1949.

And then I was born August of that year and they took over in April.

And it was a struggle.

They struggled quite a bit because my dad knew nothing about the glass business.

But he didn't worry too much because the guy that worked there knew all about glass, he was a great glass man.

So he figured that was an employee that could teach him how to do it.

Unfortunately, when they bought the shop, the guy decided he didn't want to work for my dad.

He moved across the street and opened his own glass shop and was a pretty fierce competitor for, you know,
from then on until he died many years later after I owned the business and they closed the store down.

My dad and one other person, and I forgot his name right now, started the Sierra Memorial Hospital.

And we knew he needed a bigger hospital and they purchased the land up where the Sierra Memorial Hospital is now.

And of course, there wasn't very much money around.

Money was scarce in those days.

So I can remember another logger, the grandmother's loggers and ourselves went over there with our tractors
and did all the land leveling for the Sierra Memorial Hospital.

And it was all done for just free gratis to get the hospital going.

The naming of the county library for me was the total surprise.

I happened to be at a Board of Supervisors meeting one morning and it was proposed by the truckie, truckie, Board of Supervisors member.

And then one of the supervisors said, well, usually they're dead.

I love that.

I'm also named on the drive.

It's Helen Drive.

The library's on Helen Drive.

Gene Albaugh had, I had gone to him that previous spring and said, Gene, I have to have a new address to change in all our publications and everything.

And he said, well, we're naming the street after you.

I said, oh, Gene, you know, I had asked for library drive, library circle or something.

No, we're going to do that.

Well, now that was so nice of him.

You know, that was so nice of him.

Now, my conclusion was that he didn't tell the supervisors he was going to do this
and they didn't tell him they were going to do the other.

So that's how I ended up with both.

So I went back to Gene and I said, Gene, don't you think it's a little much to have the street and library?
I said, I'd rather have the library.

Many years ago, there was not a little league baseball field.

Our children were starting to all play little league and little, little teeny tots.

And we thought, well, they were down on the lower field and we thought, no, this isn't right.

So all the guys got together and the serving was done free of charge.

Chick Thomas, who lived over on Park Avenue, had some sort of a little vehicle that he drove that would level the field.

We raked, women raked, we threw rocks, we made piles, we leveled it all off.

It was all totally done by people who wanted their children to be able to play baseball.

And the fence, the wire was donated, everything was donated.

We all worked like crazy for weeks and weeks.

There was a fire chief, first and second assistant, and their wives were responsible for answering the fire phone.

And they would start, they would get an operator on the phone and say, stay with me, it's a fire call.

And then they would start calling all the volunteer firemen.

And their response time was incredible.

Throughout the United States, the insurance company set insurance rates based on response times.

And ours were always the lowest you could have for a town of our size with a volunteer force.

We were at St.

Patrick's Barbecue at Lyons Lake.

And there was a call over the loudspeaker that, Bill Malley, you better get to your shop, there's a fire.

And so we didn't even, we made it to the bottom of the hill at East Main and they stopped us.

So a whole store went up in flames and just totally destroyed it.

So that was a tough blow because there was no insurance.

It made barely enough money to feed the family, but not enough to pay the insurance man.

So the next Monday morning, we came down and started cleaning up.

Excuse me.

And then so people heard about it.

And immediately, the Knights of Columbus, Hanson brothers, anybody that, and everybody came over and started,
they helped us clear it out, built a building.

Johnny Pontek, they prepared the glass man that went across the street,
was over at Health Palindale's to build this building.

So the community helped keep male paint and glass in business because they would have never made it otherwise.

And that's something, that's a death that I don't think we can ever repay, but every year I try it a little more.

I consider myself very lucky to have grown up in Nevada County.

I go to high school reunions and I talk to my classmates who couldn't wait to get out of here and now they can't wait to get back.

This is a really fine community.

We're all very lucky to be here.

It's well managed.

It's got good people and it's just a great place to be.

I've traveled all over the world and stayed and worked in Europe a lot for many years.

And I never expected to want to be in Nevada City.

It was just, well, you're going to move away and that's what you do.

But once you get out and see the world, Kelly's traveled as well, you realize how special this place is.

I was in the service in Texas, which I didn't like.

I know how I didn't like.

But here, you know, soon as you come in, you can smell the pine trees.

If you're away for a while, you're used to those pine trees now.

I've been able to travel all around the world and I've seen a lot of wonderful places.

I have not seen any place that I would want to call home more than Grass Valley in Nevada City.

What's the best part about living in Nevada County?
I don't know, but I sure love it.

I always have.